Free Whiskey Black Book Set: The Complete Tyrant Series (Box Set 1) by L. Douglas Hogan Page B

don’t know no Kyle
,
” one of the men said.
    Tori pointed the gun back at the man that answered.
    “You can speak for all three of you?”
    They all answered similarly.
    “We don’t know Kyle.”
    “Don’t you move, or I’ll blow your head off,” Tori warned them as she walked away from them with her pistol aiming high.
    When the men were enough of a distance away, she put her pistol back into her waistband and looked forward, but not without looking back over her shoulder on multiple occasions.
    Tori could smell the cinders of burnt wood. She was just a block away from her home when she began crying again. She stopped walking and collected herself. She stood up straight, pulled her shoulders back, and walked onto the block her house used to be on.
    Approaching her house, she could barely recognize what she was seeing. There was no upstairs or downstairs, just a ground level of nothing but steel pipes and porcelain and other debris that wouldn’t burn.
    She walked over to where the staircase used to be and to the spot where the upstairs bedroom would have been located directly above. The brass bedframe was lying in a pile of debris. There was no mattress, but there was a box spring over to the side.
    Tori turned it over, hoping to find them.
    Nothing.
    Tori walked to the spot where the bedroom closet would have been above her and saw lots of black, unrecognizable debris. She kneeled down and started moving the black debris around. Caked under this debris were the burnt bodies of Richard and Charity. He was lying in a fetal position with Charity’s body curled up within his own. They were posed as if Richard was trying to shield his daughter from death.
    Tori began to cry.
    As a mother, living with children after the Flip was a difficult thing. Losing loved ones in any type of scenario was a difficult thing. What Tori was experiencing was more than most women could endure. She had lost her entire family in a murderous act of barbarism perpetrated by a group of people she did not know.
    She stood up and wiped her nose and eyes with the back of her forearm. She still did not know where Amelia was. She spent the next two hours scouring through the debris and fruitlessly searching for the body of her oldest daughter.
    When she realized she was not going to find her, she stood up and caught her breath. She looked around the area and saw a child-sized red wagon. She had an idea to use it to haul the bodies of Richard and Charity to a burial location.
    After fetching the wagon, the task of moving the two bodies of her loved ones had to happen. She was not looking forward to disturbing their remains, but she knew it had to be done if she was to receive full closure.
    She gently brushed the debris off their bodies and pried them off the floor. The fire had melded them to the floor and some other unknown debris.
    Tori was having a difficult time and would randomly break into hysteria. Each time she attempted to move them, there would be sounds caused by the separation of their bodies from the materials they were melded to.
    After the difficult task of cleaning them off was complete, she lifted them into the wagon.
    Tori found that they were surprisingly light, but felt it only made sense because their original body composition was nothing like what she was moving.
    She pulled them to the backyard, where she found a nice spot. She walked into an old woodshed and found a shovel. She spent the next few hours digging the graves of Richard and Charity Cunningham.

    December 3
    Tori spent the night lying on the ground between the two graves. Her thoughts were of vengeance and also despair.
    How can I carry on from here? Where do I go? Where can I find Kyle? And would it be wise to pursue him?
she asked herself all night long.
    “I’m not going to be a victim,” she said out loud to herself.
    Not knowing the hour of the night or when the sun would begin its ascent over the horizon, she stood up. Tori broke into the back door of